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MNsure to announce enrollment estimates

Lucinda Jesson, commissioner of the Minnesota Department of Human Services, speaks during news conference at MNSure's offices in St. Paul, Minn., Monday, March 31, 2014. Listening at left is interim CEO of MNSure, Scott Leitz.Ann Heisenfelt/AP

MNSure officials say they should know later Tuesday morning how many Minnesotans enrolled in health care plans by last night's deadline.

"Given the heavy traffic to our call center, and our website over the weekend, up really until 11 o'clock last night, we know those numbers will significantly increase," said Lucinda Jesson, state human services commissioner.

MNSure is also tallying the number of people who tried to sign up before the deadline but couldn't complete their applications, said Jesson, who sits on the MNSure board of directors.

"If people had trouble and made a good-faith effort to get through, we'll make sure they get insurance," she told MPR News' Morning Edition.

The MNSure website was stable, despite the heavy volume of traffic, she said.

"But the challenge was, we count on the federal hub to verify individual's identity who may be eligible for financial assistance," Jesson said. "That federal hub was only intermittently available yesterday. So people had a hard time creating accounts. And those are folks, if they had trouble getting through, we want to reach out and help further."

Jesson said the goal is to help those people get signed up early this month. People that couldn't sign up were told to fill out an Enrollment Attempt Form -- and spokesman John Schadl said it could take several weeks for MNsure to process all of those.

"We're going to have to get those forms in, get them into a database, and then begin reaching out to those consumers to make sure that their cases are in the system and they can be processed," he said.

Jesson said more than 150,000 people signed up for health insurance through the state's exchange before Monday's deadline.